Oh no he's been on his bong again....

Also whose Fred?

I told you he'd be back to derail

I actually have some sympathy for the RFL with the sky deal. They were on a hiding to nothing.

Did anyone else want it?
If they did would moving to a limited viewed platform enhance the game?
What were our bargaining points / threats to make sky pay more?

You just have to look at what has (apparently) happened with the champions league to see what chasing the biggest cash price can do. There were reports that viewing figures have plummeted and this has seen a subsequent reduction of sponsorship for the tournament. In RL this would knock on massively to the clubs as it would be our sole way of anyone seeing who doesn’t attend.

Realistically as a sport we have to be on either terrestrial (never going to happen league wise) or failing that SKY. BT / Premier sports have so few viewers at this time it’s not worth going for. If after the deal runs out the landscape has changed then there may be a stick to beat SKY with but at the moment there is very little room to manoeuvre.

I think it was the length of the Sky deal which was what people were moaning about.

By the time of the next deal though, BT Sport will be much more established than it is at the moment. Don't forget that since their acquisition of EE, millions of EE customers can now access BT Sport. It's growing pretty quickly, especially now they can offer full mobile/internet/landline/tv bundles. Just this week, BT Sport signed a deal for boxing too. They're be a different beast by the time of the next deal (in terms of audience access), but I fully agree that SL didn't have much choice other than to go with Sky at the time.

I agree totally but in hindsight the length of the deal could be seen as ideal for all the reasons you have quoted.

If they had gone for a 2 or 3 year deal then they would be negotiating from the back of an economic downturn and dwindling attendance figures, not sure what has been the knock on to SKY viewing figures but I would expect they have tailed off a bit.

A lot of people really panned the RFL for the deal with very little in the way of other options or any coherent negotiating strategy.

If this was a true thread then the RFL would have to re iintroduce the franchise system. Wakefield and Cas would fail on their grounds and Salfod and Hudds struggle attracting fans, which teams would go?

Sky offered their deal well in advance of when the contract was up. No one else had even bid as the RFL hadn't asked for bids. Most people were annoyed at the fact the RFL didn't wait until the contract was up then inviting bids like previous deals. Sky basically had the RFL over a barrel stating that the offer on the table wouldn't be on the table if they went out to tender.

Congratulations Burton. You must be chuffed to speak the same language as Billy Smarts Circus. Such an honour has rarely been bestowed. Where did you learn to speak fluent Uzbek then?

As I said though what was the option?

Say to SKY that we'll take our chances knowing full well terrestrial tv was never going to happen and the rest of the competition was (and still was at time of tender) far to immature to be a viable option at even a double money offer.

Yes there needs to be other avenues looked into next time but as a minority sport we have very little in the way of leverage and SKY know that

The RFL should be constantly schmoozing other broadcasters concurrent to this current SKY deal. That way they will know if there are any other interested parties. This would in turn facilitate a decision whether or not to go out to tender next time.

Looking at the waistlines of Wood and Barwick, it would appear they already have had several dummy runs off the back of large expense accounts.

this is exactly what winds me up about sky they pretend to be the big promoters and supporters of the game when in fact they are keeping our game down with no hope of catching the Aussys with now all our very best players moving to the NRL they are in effect broadcasting a second rate comp which you would think they wouldn't want to do , they want rugby league on the cheap and lets face it there getting it the only reason why we have a top tier of 12 teams is there is not enough TV money to cover the costs of the clubs simple